Uncommon People by Eric Hobsbawm

Book Description

This collection of 26 essays range over the history of working men and women between the late 18th century and the present day, and brings back into print a selection of this celebrated historian's pioneering studies into labour history, together with more recent reflections previously unpublished in book form. Eric Hobsbawm's penetrating essays on labour history and social protest opened up a new field of study and set standards of wide-ranging, evocative, incisive analysis. Essays in this collection include the formation of the British working class; labour custom and traditions; the political radicalism of 19th century shoemakers; male and female images in revolutionary movements; revolution and sex; peasants and politics; and the common-sense of Tom Paine. More recent essays include meditations on the May Day holiday; the Vietnam War; socialism and the avantgarde; Mario Puzo, the Mafia and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano; and the cultural consequences of Christopher Columbus. Throughout these essays runs a passionate concern for the lives and struggles of ordinary men and women - uncommon people, all of them.

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Reviews

UK Kirkus Review » The 'little people' are, as Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, said 'As big as you or I' and in this collection of twenty-six essays Hobsbawm details the robust radical tendancies of major historical actors - the common people. From political shoemakers to the hard-won concession of May Day and right up to the first stirrings of jazz - a music truly born of hardship - these essays reveal the lives lived (and worked) behind political rhetoric. The writings span forty years of Hobsbawm's professional life (Kirkus UK)

Author Biography - Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917 and educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge. A Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with honorary degrees from universities in several countries. He is the well-known author of AGE OF REVOLUTION 1789-1848, THE AGE OF CAPITAL 1848-1875 etc

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